e to his
especial care.

Skegson was very silent during the journey. An idea was evidently
maturing in his mind. At the Angel he stopped and said: "Look here, I'll
tell you what we'll do. Don't let's go and see that rot. Let's go to a
Music Hall."

I gasped for breath. I had heard of Music Halls. A stout lady had
denounced them across our dinner table on one occasion--fixing the while
a steely eye upon her husband, who sat opposite and seemed
uncomfortable--as low, horrid places, where people smoked and drank, and
wore short skirts, and had added an opinion that they ought to be put
down by the police--whether the skirts or the halls she did not explain.
I also recollected that our charwoman, whose son had lately left London
for a protracted stay in Devonshire, had, in conversation with my mother,
dated his downfall from the day when he first visited one of these
places; and likewise that Mrs. Philcox's nursemaid, upon her confessing
that she had spent an evening at one with her young man, had been called
a shameless hussy, and summarily dismissed as being no longer a fit
associate for the baby.

But the spirit of lawlessness was strong within me in those days, so that
I hearkened to the voice of Skegson, the tempter, and he lured my feet
from the paths that led to virtue and Sadler's Wells, and we wandered
into the broad and crowded ways that branch off from the Angel towards
Merry Islington.

Skegson insisted that we should do the thing in style, so we stopped at a
shop near the Agricultural Hall and purchased some big cigars. A huge
card in the window claimed for these that they were "the most
satisfactory twopenny smokes in London." I smoked two of them during the
evening, and never felt more satisfied--using the word in its true sense,
as implying that a person has had enough of a thing, and does not desire
any more of it, just then--in all my life. Where we went, and what we
saw, my memory is not very clear upon. We sat at a little marble table.
I know it was marble because it was so hard, and cool to the head. From
out of the smoky mist a ponderous creature of strange, undefined shape
floated heavily towards us, and deposited a squat tumbler in front of me
containing a pale yellowish liquor, which subsequent investigation has
led me to believe must have been Scotch whisky. It seemed to me then the
most nauseous stuff I had ever swallowed. It is curious to look back and
notice how one's tastes ch